After The Time Machine: More Dangerous Futures

“...in the prodigious misery and ignorance of the swarming masses of mankind in England, the seeds of its certain ruin are sown.”
Charles Dickens
in a letter 1843

"In the case of every other predominant animal the world has ever seen, the hour of its complete ascendancy has been the eve of its entire overthrow."
H.G. Wells 1894

“What have my books been from The Time Machine to World Brain and my Fate of Homo Sapiens but the clearest insistence on the insecurity of progress and the possibility of human degeneration and extinction? I think the odds are against man but it is still worth fighting against them.”
H.G. Wells 1939

For the first time in The Time Machine, the future is described as a direct consequence of the past—not through the intercession of magic or as reward or punishment from a deity, but according to the logic of cause and effect. After this immediately popular tale, virtually all stories about the future—and most rational thought—take this as their assumed premise. In this novel, Wells created our axiomatic future: the future evolves.

The crucial supporting point he makes is that the future is not assured by any dominant interpretation of the present. The reigning powers and the cultural consensus, emboldened by a quick, simplistic and self-serving interpretation of Darwinian evolution, foresaw inevitable progress for the human species. Wells demonstrates that this isn’t necessarily so.

In The Time Machine, Wells specifically attacked erroneous readings of Darwin. This novel dramatized the possibility of not progress but the retrogression of the human species.  But it was not the first nor the last time he wrote about this possibility.

contemporary speculation on what a further evolved
rat might look like.

In several articles he wrote in the 1890s, Wells warned that humans as the top species was itself not guaranteed: other species could conceivably develop to challenge humanity.

 He expressed this most succinctly and eloquently in his essay “The Extinction of Man,” published in 1894 while he was finishing The Time Machine: "In the case of every other predominant animal the world has ever seen, the hour of its complete ascendancy has been the eve of its entire overthrow."

Wells suggested that even existing species could someday overcome human dominance. In “Zoological Retrogression”(1891) he wrote that Nature may be "in unsuspected obscurity, equipping some now humble creature with wider possibilities of appetite, endurance, or destruction, to rise in the fullness of time and sweep homo away into the darkness from which his universe arose.”

In an 1894 essay, “The Rate of Change in Species,” he notes that “The true heirs of the future are the small, fecund, and precocious creatures…” able to adapt to large scale changes in climate or environment. In “The Extinction of Man,” he names four kinds of small creatures that could displace humanity: crustaceans, cephalopods, plague bacilli, and ants.

He also wrote several short stories dramatizing this possibility, including “Empire of the Ants” in 1905: A small gunboat is sent up the Amazon river to investigate reports of a plague of ants. The captain is insulted by the ridiculous assignment but the science-minded engineer is curious. The reports mention “a new sort of ant,” somewhat like the leaf-cutting ants in that they act with purpose and appear to obey leaders. “He perceived the ants were becoming interesting,” Wells writes, “and the nearer he drew to them the more interesting they became.”

Eventually the gunboat crew confronts the uncommonly large ants, which are equipped with a natural poison capable of killing humans, as well as the intelligent leadership and learning ability to use it strategically. After the ants kill his lieutenant, the hapless captain can’t think of anything to do but shoot his gun meaninglessly into the forest, and escape.

Telling the story back in England, the engineer reports, "These are intelligent ants. Just think what that means!" They deploy so effectively that they crossed water and other barriers to take control of a large area of the Upper Amazon, causing "the flight or slaughter of every human being in the new areas they invade." Information is scarce because "no eye-witnesses of their activity…has survived the encounter." The story's narrator suggests these intelligent ants will reach Europe by 1960.

It is not one of Wells’ best stories (though not as bad as the 1977 movie with Joan Collins that shares little with the story but the title.) It is intriguing however for how closely it resembles a Joseph Conrad story, especially “The Heart of Darkness.” Wells and Conrad were friends, and Wells’ son Anthony wrote that HG had wanted to write something in the manner of Conrad, which may be how The Island of Doctor Moreau began.

Both “Empire of the Ants” and “The Heart of Darkness” are accounts of voyages in a small boat down a remote river through disorienting jungle wilderness, to investigate some unusual trouble far from the centers of civilization. They even have a scene in common: the shooting of a big gun randomly into the forest, at no particular target (something that Conrad had actually observed along the coast of Africa in 1890.) Both stories are told by a participant, but back in England.

Ants threaten humanity to some degree already in several parts of the world, so they aren’t a bad choice for eventual domination, especially since small creatures like ants are most likely to thrive in a hotter world. But in his fiction, Wells also suggests a different source for a suddenly overpowering species: outer space.

His celebrated 1898 novel The War of the Worlds dramatized the conquest of humanity by a technologically superior species from the planet Mars. But once again, as in The Time Machine, Wells was asking his readers to peer into another possible human future.

To be continued.  For prior posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below.